Customer Reviews:
 Uncollected Wells April 25, 1999
10 out of 11 found this review helpful
Wells was 34 when this charming, comical and realistic book, set with cartographic accuracy in London in the 1880s, came out. He had already almost single-handedly (with a little help from Jules Verne) invented science fiction, but this was his first traditional novel. Number 6 on the official "A"-List of the Fireside Reading Club (read 2/4/96), Love and Mr. Lewisham is very much a coming-of-age novel, with an intellectually ambitious adolescent finding his romantic impulses getting in the way of his ambitions. It's a novel of idealistic youth defeated (seemingly) by early marriage. It's surprisingly sweet and sentimental, and one feels like screaming when the hero marries the wrong young woman - the physically attractive but dimwitted one rather than the one whose mind and great socialist ideals matched his and who believed in him. I had no idea the intimidating (and beastly according to ...biographer Michael Coren) Wells could be such a tender, sentimental romantic. Henry James, who was a friend of Wells' (and 23 years his senior) at the time this book came out (they later had a permanent falling out), wrote to Wells to say he found the book "a great charm and a great deal of the real thing," and "a bloody little chunk of life, of no small substance." This is the first of an autobiographical trilogy...
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